Chapter 1164
Blood dripped down Tauno’s left shoulder onto what he was generously calling his arm. It was undeniably his, but whether it was an arm was certainly in question. He’d had one not long before, now he had carved pieces of bone held together with straps of leather.
Tauno was quite aware that he would be able to get a much better replacement if he returned to the Alliance’s territory, but he felt like he was finally making progress. Apparently, after fighting enough beasts the size of a small planet you would eventually see some improvement.
Or maybe that was the blood loss talking and he was going to die soon. Perhaps even in this very battle. The untamed territories of the Trigold Cluster were vast, and had provided a great number of enemies to train against. Size wasn’t everything, but Tauno thought that he might have overestimated himself stepping up from small planet sized to large planet sized foes.
He should have left it for later. It wasn’t like someone else was going to come along and take this prey from him. Nobody even really knew it was there, since he’d only intuited its presence from how ships seemed to disappear in a certain region of space.
Tauno literally couldn’t see all of the beast he’d been fighting, and not because it was mostly in subspace like distortion beasts. Instead, it was kind of the opposite. It was mostly in normal space- but not entirely. It had appeared from a distance to be a large blob, but he supposed any beast large enough to generate its own gravity might relax into such a position.
Various parts of it unfurled into long appendages covered with spikes, and they were by no means slow. Many parts split into smaller branches, though they didn’t necessarily need to. The vast amounts of energy coming off of the thing meant it didn’t actually have to hit Tauno directly. The blood dripping down his shoulder was not a product of a direct hit, or he would be mush. As for damage to the beast…
He’d managed to injure the beast enough for a lake of blood to pour out. Unfortunately, Tauno would need a whole planet’s worth of oceans to even begin to win. This was the sort of thing he’d need to be Domination to defeat. He should run to fight again later.
His grip clenched on a spine taken from the very creature he was fighting. Even if he could escape, he knew he’d never come back. Once he acted on his fear in that manner, he could collapse. He remembered acting on his fear long in the past, and he never wanted to return. Death would be better.
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